Emulation components and system including distributed event monitoring, and testing of an IC design under emulation

Abstract

Data processing resources are distributively provided to an emulation system to locally and correspondingly generate testing stimuli, and applying the generated testing stimuli to partitions of an IC design to be emulated. In one embodiment, the distributed data processing resources further locally and correspondingly retrieve state data of emulation state circuit elements, analyze the retrieved state data for one or more events, and report the one or more events upon their detection. In one embodiment, the distributed data processing resources are disposed on logic boards of an emulation system. In other embodiments, at least some of the distributed data processing resources are disposed on the emulation ICs of the logic boards.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0001]1. Field of the Invention[0002]The present invention relates to the field of emulation. More specifically, the present invention relates to the components, such as integrated circuits and logic boards, employed to form emulation systems, and testing methodologies practiced thereon.[0003]2. Background Information[0004]The first generation of prior art emulation systems were typically formed using general purpose FPGAs without integrated debugging facilities. To emulate a circuit design on one of such emulation systems, the circuit design would be “realized” by compiling a formal description of the circuit design, partitioning the circuit design into subsets, mapping the various subsets to the logic elements (LEs) of the FPGAs of various logic boards of the emulation system, and then configuring and interconnecting the LEs. The partitioning and mapping operations would be typically performed on workstations that are part of or complementary to the emul...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0008]Data processing resources are distributively provided to an emulation system to locally and correspondingly generate testing stimuli, and applying the generated testing stimuli to partitions of an IC design to be emulated. In one embodiment, the distributed data processing resources further locally and correspondingly retrieve state data of emulation state circuit elements, analyze the retrieved state data for one or more events, and report the one or more events upon their detection.

Problems solved by technology

Likewise, more and more state elements and / or signals of interest of the emulation ICs have to be transferred out of the emulation ICs and logic boards to facilitate analysis, leading to the formation of various bottlenecks, in particular, at the logic boards, preventing efficient operation of the emulation systems.

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